Near-Linear Time Algorithm for n-fold ILPs via Color Coding

We study an important case of ILPs $\max\{c^Tx \ \vert\ \mathcal Ax = b, l \leq x \leq u,\, x \in \mathbb{Z}^{n t} \}$ with $n\cdot t$ variables and lower and upper bounds $\ell, u\in\mathbb Z^{nt}$. In $n$-fold ILPs non-zero entries only appear in the first $r$ rows of the matrix $\mathcal A$ and in small blocks of size $s\times t$ along the diagonal underneath. Despite this restriction many optimization problems can be expressed in this form. It is known that $n$-fold ILPs can be solved in FPT time regarding the parameters $s, r,$ and $\Delta$, where $\Delta$ is the greatest absolute value of an entry in $\mathcal A$. The state-of-the-art technique is a local search algorithm that subsequently moves in an improving direction. Both, the number of iterations and the search for such an improving direction take time $\Omega(n)$, leading to a quadratic running time in $n$. We introduce a technique based on Color Coding, which allows us to compute these improving directions in logarithmic time after a single initialization step. This leads to the first algorithm for $n$-fold ILPs with a running time that is near-linear in the number $nt$ of variables, namely $(rs\Delta)^{O(r^2s + s^2)} L^2 \cdot nt \log^{O(1)}(nt)$, where $L$ is the encoding length of the largest integer in the input. In contrast to the algorithms in recent literature, we do not need to solve the LP relaxation in order to handle unbounded variables. Instead, we give a structural lemma to introduce appropriate bounds. If, on the other hand, we are given such an LP solution, the running time can be decreased by a factor of $L$.